Bill Gates has been working hard to push his memoir Source Code, reaching out to followers in a virtual Q&A session on Instagram. Asked if he was always a ‘nerd’, Gates took the audience by surprise when he disclosed that he was really the ‘class clown’ at school. He went on, “I was really the class clown for a long time. But then there were two experiences that convinced me I needed to be something more than that.”
Bill Gates Instagram story
He recalled two moments that changed his attitude: “First, I started getting paired off for class projects with the other kids in class who got poor grades—and I thought, ‘Holy sh*t, they actually think I’m stupid.’ Second, I became best friends with a guy named Kent Evans, who got excellent grades and had big dreams and made me want to do the same.”
Bill Gates also recalled anecdotes about his Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who died in 2018. He told how Allen was “a couple of years older than me, cooler than me, and one of the only kids in high school with a full beard.” They met in the computer lab of their school after it acquired a teletype machine. Gates remembered, “I’m pretty sure ‘Bill, you think you’re so smart, you figure this thing out,’ was the first thing my future business partner ever said to me.”
Readers also asked him about the first time he coded and whether he ever got into trouble for sneaking away to code at night.
